Tobin, Paulette. "It's Almost Comedy Central: German Humor has Ties to the Past..." Grand Forks Herald, 22 August 1999.

When Ron Vossler, a senior lecturer in the English department
at UND, told his colleagues he was studying German Russian humor,
their response was telling: "That shouldn't take you long."

The culture and history of the Germans from Russia isn't particularly
well known, even though tens of thousands of North Dakotans and
South Dakotans come from that distinctive ethnic group. Moreover,
their stereotype is of hard-working, thrifty and humorless people.

"Not so," said Vossler, who grew up in the German-Russian
enclave of Wishek, N.D., and who shares that ethnic background.

"Yes, the humor exists and there's a lot of it," Vossler
said at national convention of the Germans from Russia Heritage
Society in Aberdeen, S.D., earlier this summer.

The humor of the Germans from Russia includes folk humor, proverbs
and one-liners, nicknames and nonsense rhymes and greetings. Sometimes
it is earthy and scatological, the kind of humor one would expect
from people who for centuries were farmers familiar with fieldwork
and animal husbandry. It also reflects the long journey and history
of a people who over a couple of centuries moved from Germany to
Russia and then to the U.S. "Wherever they went, they were
different, the stranger in a strange land," Vossler said. "Being
different and clannish meant sometimes they were misunderstood and
became the butt of the joke."

"There's an edge to their humor," Vossler said. "It's
what you would expect from people who survived a lot of hard times."

Vossler, who studied and is lecturing about German-Russian humor
through a grant from the North Dakota Humanities Council, said folk
proverbs, which often date back to the 18th century Germanic provinces,
are the earliest evidence of German-Russian humor. Many are recorded
in the book "Central Dakota Germans" by Shirley Fischer
Arends. Their number and variety tell a lot about the German people
and their culture. Here's a sample:

Lieber a laus im kraut wie gar kei fleisch. Rather a louse in
the cabbage than no meat at all.

Viel rutschen macht blede hose. A lot of sliding wears out your
pants. (If you move too often or change jobs too often, you end
up with nothing.)

Wo die liebe na fallt da bleibt sie liebe, und wanns gerade immisthaufe
isch. Where love falls, there love stays lying, and if it is right
in a heap of manure.

Der eigener lob stinkt. Self praise stinks.

Humor in the German dialect often is full of 'umgangsprache',
a term linguists use to describe language in which neutral terms
could be replaced with emotionally charged expressions, Vossler
said. This was reflected in the way his German grandmother might
react if her small grandson tracked mud onto her clean floor.

The author Joseph Height in "Paradise on the Steppe"
noted that the German Russians loved to taunt and tease and used
nicknames, epithets and jibes to lampoon human foibles and frailties.
Vossler said current political correctness might cast a negative
view on the often hard-edged humor. But he said the Germans thought
giving lots of praise and compliments would tempt fate and lead
to the sin of pride. That's why, depending on tone and circumstances,
nicknames like "stink katz" (skunk) could be terms of
endearment.

Likewise, nicknames were a way of keeping straight the people
from the same family who had similar names, and also a way of remembering
a person who had some notable characteristic, or who had done something
silly. The later explained why a Vossler acquaintance who had once
bragged about how accurately he could back his father's tractor
to a hitch was known ever after as entchi, or tractor.

Germans also enjoy nonsense rhymes and greetings, Vossler said.
If two people met after a long time, one might say, "I haven't
seen you for a while," to which the other would reply: "Yah,
was han ich dir in der weg gelegt?" "Yah, what did I put
in your way?" Or if a child asked his father, "Where are
you going?" and the father didn't think it was any of the child's
business, he might say: "Ins loch, bohne lese." "Into
a hole, to pick beans."

Germans also enjoy having fun in two languages at the same time,
Vossler said. If one greeted the other with "Vie gehts?"
(German for How's it going? and pronounced vee gates) the other
might reply, "The gate's OK, but the fence is broke."

German humor includes many ribald and hilarious stories not suitable
for a family newspaper. Other jokes and stories illustrate how German
people were misunderstood, and how they misunderstood or were prejudiced
against other people and groups. One such story turns the table
on a couple of Protestants:

A Catholic nun who had broken her arm was walking down the street
when she was approached by two old bachelors who asked what had
happened because her arm was in a cast.

"Oh," the nun said, "I fell in the bathtub."

As they walked on, one of the bachelors turned to the other and
said, "What's a bathtub?" The other said, "How should
I know? I'm not Catholic."

German humor has a lot in common with Jewish humor, Vossler said.
Germans and Jews share a common root language (Yiddish is a German
dialect spelled with Hebrew letters) and both ethnic groups tell
jokes which contain more harshness than merriment and describe economic
hardship, as in this joke:

A German-Russian woman whose husband had just died went to the
town newspaper to put his obituary in the paper. The editor said
publishing the obituary would cost 50 cents a word.

Vossler said some of the scholars he had studied in his research
believed jokes about business owners and their interaction with
German-Russian clients showed friction or perhaps just their struggle
to understand each other.

No doubt a few German Russian shoppers felt ignorant, or backward,
not knowing much English, and the storekeepers and businessmen might
even have viewed them that way and treated them accordingly, Vossler
said.

Yet those same jokes usually depicted the person who didn't understand
German as the ignorant one. Perhaps this was the German way of fighting
back against the way many people viewed them, Vossler said. Jokes
helped them define their ethnicity in a positive way.

Jokes could also play a role in mediating conflicts by bringing
them out in the open and making fun of them, and that, Vossler said,
leads to an important question in our multicultural world: Do jokes
about other groups, or jokes that only some people understand, help
or hinder our living together and getting along?

"My view is that humor, which is essentially democratic,
creates community," Vossler said, "and one way the German
Russians adapted was by means of their humor."

Their humor, Vossler said, helped the Germans from Russia to endure
difficult lives, to get along with others and to keep part of their
culture and birthright as they journeyed from their old peasant
life in Germany and Russia into modern life in America.

Reprinted with permission of the Grand Forks Herald.

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